segunda-feira, 30 de abril de 2012

LaKademy - Days of code and fun.


Hi everyone,

I'm posting directly from Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it is happening the LaKademy 2012. I came this year as a newcomer (passed in GSoC this year), and expect to keep working hard to help the community and attend to other KDE events too.

I arrived in Porto Alegre on Thursday (April 26th) at night and only had time to rest a little to start working hard on Friday (inauguration day of the event). I did not know anyone that came here (except  Lamarque (my GSoC mentor), so, it is a good opportunity to know everybody and integrate myself in the Latin America KDE community.

My GSoC project is to develop a new plasmoid for Plasma NetworkManagement using QML (link). So, on Friday (April 27th) I talked to Lamarque about the best way to implement the new connections List Model to show wireless networks in the area. After that we defined the architecture that fits better to our purposes and I started implementing it. So, on Friday I could create the first part of the code, but, couldn't see anything on the screen yet. At night, as usual, everyone went to drink a beer somewhere near the hostel. These times are really fun and we laugh a lot.

First day of LaKademy
On the second day, we went to FLISOL, had some meetings there and they set up a room for us, so, we could work from there too. By the end of that day, I could see some connections inside my QML Plasmoid, so, I was able to see the implementation working on the screen. One thing that I really like about events like LaKademy is that everyone is always willing to help you with problems that you might have, this is very useful and made me see how important events like these are.

LaKademy room at FLISOL

The third day started with a meeting about KDE Promo, the meeting was very good and some things were decided to be done to help promote KDE in all Latin America. Besides this meeting, I implemented a way to show all wireless connections on the Plasmoid Popup, and update their signal strength (my main goal for this lakademy! :) ). However, I was still facing a segmentation fault error, that I decided to solve on the next day.

Promo meeting in LaKademy

Today is my last day here T LaKademy and I finally fixed the segmentation fault in my code, so, I am now showing all the wireless network connections near my computer, on the QML Plasmoid Popup.  The Popup is also updated when a network appears or disappears. The screen of my current implementation is showed below:

QML screen for Plasma NM Popup
I intend now to concentrate my efforts in showing other interface connection types that Plasma NM supports, so, I can advance my work for summer of code and anticipate some problems that I might encounter.

I really enjoyed participating of LaKademy and wonder to participate of other events that community will provide. Thanks to everyone.

LaKademy participants

That's all. I hope to post soon here. Bye!